iFail

Ok, I failed miserably to cover the Christmas gift idea thingy in this blog after starting it… so hate me. In the meantime, though, check out this very interesting article on the iPhone on Wired’s web site (nice site redesign, btw, guys).

Also upcoming, I’m going to compare and contrast a couple software products that are good for doing video capture on the Mac, iShowU and Snapz Pro X. Snapz Pro X is also a full featured screen capture program for still captures too.

In the meantime, go listen to some Fresh Ubuntu, and/or some Mac Geek Gab. Happy, happy, joy joy.

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Blog, software

More on Reader - Browsing for Blogs

One of the really cool features of google reader that I didn’t mention is the way searching for new blogs/rss feeds works.

Right beside “Add Subscription” in the navigation pane, click the “Browse >>” link.

You’ll see a screen now where you can choose predefined feed bundles, or enter a search term to match.

Once you do enter a search term and google reader’s found some matches, it gives you a listing and the ability to subscribe to each match.

Click the subscribe button on any that you want:

And right there, in very cool and handy style, is the ability to categorize it by moving it to a folder. No need to go into “manage subscriptions” at all.

Everyone knows google makes cool web apps, using ajax where appropriate, and generally not when it isn’t, but reader is, so far as I’ve seen, a great example of doing the right things for the task at hand and ignoring things that would be extraneous.

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Blog, computers, rss, software

Google my Reader

I like to support mac software authors, and I’m also not a huge fan of having my apps on the internet. But I finally switched to using google reader the other day for a couple reasons, and so far I’m more impressed than I thought I’d be. Part of that is my lowered expectations for rss readers these days though.

I’ve used a variety of rss readers on the mac - the now non-existant NewsMac Pro, by ThinkMac software, NewsFire, and more recently, NewsLife (again by ThinkMac). Below is a partial screen capture of NewsLife.

NewsLife is a great little app in a lot of ways, but it’s frustrating in others. OPML export doesn’t work yet - it’s in there, and it acts like it works, it just never actually creates a file for you.

Also, if you are reading a post in a feed, and you want to mark the feed read, you can’t - not unless you click on the feed name again to get out of the specific post and back to the article listing view for the feed.

Performing “Mark feed as read” while at this level won’t work:

At this level, “Mark feed as read” does work:

Anyway, among other things, I thought as long as I would be trying to sneak peaks at my rss feed at work, and you know I will, I might as well make it easy on myself. So I started entering feeds into google reader one by one (remember - NewsLife’s OPML export doesn’t work?!??).

Things I like:

I like the default views for the reader - the aggregate folder views and the rss feed listing views.

Things I don’t like:

I’m not so nuts about the “manage subscriptions” view as with hundreds of feeds it could quickly grow unweildy.

I also don’t like that, once you create a folder, it doesn’t seem possible to rename or delete that folder. What am I missing?

Adding a feed is easy enough:

After that, you can move it to a folder easily, as the newly added feed is shown in article list view for you:

Because you are in a browser, the feed and article listings show any posts that have images and layout just as your browser would - because it is your browser!

I’m happy enough with google reader that, well… the picture below says it all.

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computers, Blog, rss, software